One year – this can be a short but also a long time. For Violetta Kovreckaja from Vitebsk – the cultural capital in the North of Belarus, close to the border with Latvia, where Marc Chagall was born – it meant 12 long months of waiting. It finally took that long until we could provide her with a replacement speech processor and an Online fitting session.
Violetta experienced her cochlear implantation at the University clinic in Ferrara in 2012. For the parents this meant a big financial effort. Luckily a few foundations contributed to cover the costs. For a couple of years Violetta and her parents travelled to Italy again and again to have the fittings of her speech processor. However, 5 year ago it was for the last time.
For over 8 years the now 13 years old schoolgirl has been wearing her Harmony, all this time he was serving her well, but now it was not functioning properly any longer.
In Belarus there is an established CI programme financed by the government. Within the framework of the annually advertised tenders, however, cochlear implants were bought from two manufacturers but not from Advanced Bionics so far. Consequently there is no chance to get an upgrade speech processor from Advanced Bionics under the programme financed by the government.
We – the Lehnhardt Foundation – effectively supported by Jan Röhrig (Deaf Ohr Alive – Hessen Rhein Main), found a donor who was ready to pass his Naida Q 90 which he did not need any longer to Violetta. We sent it to Vitebsk.
The “only thing” that was needed to organize was the fitting of the SP. Natalya Kalintscheva, a representative of the company Advanced Bionics, helped to arrange it. She also sent the necessary equipment from Moscow to a business partner, Timur Nurseitov (Fonamed) in Minsk. Technical questions concerning the remote fitting and the programming were solved by Ruslan Kertiev, also from Moscow. Already before that he offered a preparatory training for the personnel in Minsk, so that the session could happen without any problems.
Ing. Evgenija V. Burak and the surdopedagog Liubov A. Proschina from the ENT scientific-practical Center of the Republic of Belarus (RNPZ) in Minsk (http://www.lor.by) supported the family professionally and with a high level of empathy.
With united forces we succeeded: Violetta is happy and can continue to attend and thanks to good hearing perform well in normal school.
Dr. Monika Lehnhardt-Goriany
August 2021
Photo: Andrej A. Razhko und Julia V. Razhko (parents), Evgenija V. Burak und Violetta
“Violetta pursues her hobby painting with great enthusiasm”
